“Will be sending an email every week strongly advising our people to never keep savings on any exchange, including Paxful. This is the way! Self custody your savings ALWAYS!”
Ray Youssef is the co-founder and CEO of Paxful, one of the world’s largest peer-to-peer platforms for buying and selling Bitcoin. His journey as an entrepreneur has been difficult, with two successful startups and 11 failed ones, which he has said taught him many lessons.
Youssef has stated that he’s on a mission to make the poor rich, which is why he created Paxful — to offer the world a payment method that could help the unbanked, the oppressed and all those who need to emerge from “financial apartheid.”
Youssef grew up humbly in New York City, born to Egyptian parents who had migrated to the United States. He studied history at Baruch College but discovered a passion for computers and, in 1999, started working at phone company YadaYada as a senior software engineer. In 2001, he founded MatrixM, a ringtone pioneer.
From 2005 through 2015, he ran a series of failed startups. Youssef discovered Bitcoin in 2011 but left New York to support the Egyptian revolution and forgot about the cryptocurrency. He found himself in trouble after joining protests in downtown Cairo, nearly dying on the first night of fighting and getting arrested by the military as a suspected CIA agent.
Back in the U.S., he encountered his current business partner, Estonia native Artur Schaback, at a Bitcoin meeting. The two got along well and started discussing setting up a Bitcoin payment solution company. They launched Paxful, Youssef’s 13th and most successful business.
Youssef also founded the Built With Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit organization using Bitcoin to provide access to clean water, quality education, healthy food and a healthy environment via sustainable farming.
2022 was highly successful for Youssef and Paxful. In March, Time magazine named the company one of its “Time100 Most Influential Companies of 2022.”
The company hit 10 million users worldwide and launched Bitcoin education centers in Nigeria and El Salvador to empower local communities financially. The foundation opened a Bitcoin Technology Center — appropriately abbreviated “BTC” — in Ghana to offer finance and technology education.
The center was built in Kumasi, home to Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology — one of Ghana’s largest, most prestigious universities.
In November, Paxful removed ETH from its offering, citing Ethereum’s switch to proof-of-stake and centralization as the primary reasons.
The success of 2022’s Bitcoin conferences in Africa brought more business and enthusiasm to the Paxful team, with Youssef pledging to continue to follow the same direction in 2023.
According to Youssef, hyperbitcoinization will be fastest in the Global South, as that’s where it’s most needed. This view is reflected in his work with the Built With Bitcoin Foundation, which will seek to financially empower more communities in Africa and South America in 2023 and build healthier lives.
